Below are the details of the next NNMHR workshop to be held at the University of Glasgow on 22nd January 2016.
To register for the workshop or for any further information, please email Harriet Ryder ().
There are a number of bursaries available to cover travel expenses of any postgraduate students wishing to attend – if you’d like to apply for one of these, simply let Harriet know when you register.
The Northern Network workshop runs from 10am-5pm and is followed by a launch event for Glasgow University’s Medical Humanities Network Website. You are very welcome to stay on for this event.
If you would like to reserve a free ticket, the best way to do so is through the Eventbrite page:
If you have any questions about the evening, please email Hannah Tweed at ">. We hope to see you in January!
Northern Network for Medical Humanities
Glasgow Workshop Programme
Friday 22 January 2016
Location: Seminar Room One (Yudowitz), Wolfson Medical School, University Avenue, Glasgow G12 8QQ (see campus map)
10-1045 Arrival, Coffee and Welcome (Atrium)
1045-1200 Session One: Posthuman Medical Humanities.
Chair: Dr Sabine Wieber, History of Art, Glasgow University
Dr Sarah Cockram, History, Glasgow University: ‘Living with Companion Animals at the Renaissance Court’
Dr Anna McFarlane, English Literature, Glasgow University: ‘Posthuman Medicine’
Dr Douglas Small, English Literature, Glasgow University: ‘Cocaine and Cultural Mythology, c.1860-1919’
Ms Thora Hands, CSHHH/History, Strathclyde University: ‘Reframing Drink and the Victorians: The consumption of alcohol in Britain 1869-1914’
1200-1215 Comfort Break
1215-1330 Session Two: Mental Health
Chair: Dr Sheila Dickson, German, Glasgow University
Dr Matt Smith, CSHHH/History, Strathclyde University: ‘The Magic Years: American Psychiatry’s Take on the History of Post-War American Psychiatry, 1945-1970’
Dr Cheryl McGeachan and Prof. Chris Philo, Geographical and Earth Sciences, Glasgow University: ‘Asylum and Post-Asylum Spaces’
Dr Ross White, Mental Health and Wellbeing, Glasgow University: ‘Understanding the distress of Langi people living in Northern Uganda’
Ms Moira Hansen, Scottish Literature, Glasgow University: ‘“Melancholy and low spirits are half my disease”: Physical and mental health in the life and works of Robert Burns’
1330-1430 Lunch (Atrium)
1430-1530 Session Three: Textual Cultures
Chair: Dr Christine Ferguson, English Literature, Glasgow University
Ms Laura Stevens, Library, Glasgow University, ‘Digitisation of records of Gartnavel Royal Hospital and Crichton Royal Institution’
Dr Hannah Tweed, English Literature, Glasgow University: ‘Medical Paratexts’
Dr Megan Coyer, English Literature, Glasgow University: ‘Blackwood’s Magazine and Nineteenth-Century Medical Humanism’
1530-1600 Coffee (Atrium)
1600-1700 Session Four: Ethics and Care
Chair: Dr Cheryl McGeachan, Geographical and Earth Sciences, Glasgow University
Rev Dr Hamilton Inbadas, Glasgow End of Life Studies Group, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Glasgow University (Crichton Campus), ‘Philosophy/theology and understanding spirituality at the end of life in India’
Dr Angus Ferguson, Centre for History of Medicine/Economic and Social History, Glasgow University, ‘Medical confidentiality’
Dr Lucy Pickering, School of Social and Political Sciences, Glasgow University, ‘Under the Influence: On the Ethics of Research with Active Drug Users’
1700-1830: Dr Megan Coyer & Dr Hannah Tweed: Launch of Glasgow University Medical Humanities Network Website
‘Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind’ is an interdisciplinary network that uses the radical insights of aesthetic modernism to develop dialogue with medical practice in psychiatry, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, neurology, and old age psychiatry. The project is dynamically interdisciplinary, fostering collaboration between researchers and clinicians working in Higher Education, the NHS, and international healthcare. It brings literary and arts scholars, philosophers, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, neuropsychologists, neurologists, and doctors in palliative care into dialogue with theatre practitioners, dancers and artists from across the UK, Europe and the USA, asking them to explore together the resources modernism offers for creatively understanding experiences of body and mind poorly served by realist models of the self.
The project explores the historical and discursive links between literary modernism, medical discoveries, and clinical practice. Underpinning the project is the significance of phenomenology and the first-person experience of medicine. The project considers modernism’s specific ability to speak to seemingly unruly mental and embodied states, and the conceptual ‘black hole’ of extreme old age, using performance-as-research strategies to consider how theatre and dance might help scholars and clinicians understand these states via experiential means. It also explores the role of the visual arts in communicating experiences that resist conceptual definition.
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
N/A
Funding sources:
Newcastle Institute of Creative Arts Practice Award 2014
Summary of research:
Funded by Newcastle Institute of Creative Arts Practice Award 2014 as part of the transdisciplinary project ‘Student partner approaches for strategic design and evaluation of artistic modelling as a teaching and learning method in anatomy education’, Artatomy hosted two exhibitions at the University’s Students Union and International Centre for Life in collaboration with Dr Iain Keenan, Rachael Allen (visual artist and researcher) and undergraduate medical students. Artatomy brings the art of anatomy as explored by Newcastle undergraduate medical and biomedical students and focuses on learning and reflection through creativity, expression and imagination, where the students were invited to engage with the broader aesthetics, ethics and sensorial experience of anatomy.
“Giving them the chance to explore their creative side on their own terms, Artatomy has helped them re-connect with the process of drawing that they may not be using much in their studies or in their day to day life – and in some cases haven’t used since they were at school. The artwork they’ve produced is rich in imagination, skill and expression, and is indicative of the true potential and value of art when students are given the choice to explore and participate.” (Rachael Allen) Project website/webpage:
Dr Eleanor Holmes, GP, clinical educator and writer – pen name Eliot North
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
N/A
Funding sources:
a-n New Collaboration Bursary
Summary of research:
Rachael Allen joined forces with Dr Eleanor Holmes to investigate the creative potential for collaborative engagement across the visual and literary arts through the exchange of experiences as artist and writer, whilst exploring the interface between medicine, health, the arts and humanities. The bursary subsidised valuable time exploring each other’s creative disciplines and methodologies – drawing, sculpture, creative writing and teaching – and specific research interests – anatomy, pathophysiology, medical education, clinical practice and bioethics – to inspire new ideas for joint visual and literary outcomes.
“We met as strangers from very different worlds (medicine and art) with contrasting backgrounds and experiences (doctor and patient) but found common languages with which to negotiate our beliefs and perspectives on human health, morbidity and mortality. The collaboration created an intimate space for us to share our own narratives, life stories and emotions that surfaced through our interactions. We are now friends. Our unfolding conversations drive our ongoing ‘Lessons in Anatomy’, illuminating not only the relationship between the arts and medicine but also the fine line separating the dead and the living, doctor and patient, health and illness, as well as the relationship between two women with very different views and experiences of mortality.”
In the eighteenth century, as well as our own, certain diseases could be construed as endowing a sick person with some social or cultural cachet popularly associated with the illness. Melancholy could lend an air of creativity, gout could indicate class and wealth, and nerves could suggest a fashionable sensibility. A slight illness and enough wealth to travel could lead one to the spas and seaside resorts that, outside of London, formed the centres of fashionable society, or perhaps even lead abroad for warmer climes. As such, fashionable diseases also became the object of stigma, satire and allegations of fakery. They could be linked to the putative artificiality of ‘manners,’ modishness and the posturing of the beau monde. As Alexander Pope’s poetic satire says of women in the ‘Cave of Spleen,’ ‘The fair ones feel such maladies as these, When each new night-dress gives a new disease.’ Yet while social discourses might define it as such, the afflicted might not find the experience of such diseases fashionable at all, but rather a reality of painful suffering.
The ‘Fashionable Diseases’ project interrogates the meanings of the word ‘fashionable’ when applied to disease, and particularly explores the ways in which the medicine, literature and culture of the eighteenth century define and represent often debilitating diseases as fashionable. It seeks to discover how labels alter our conceptions of disease and provide narratives that may be at variance with actual patient experience, or that might even construct that experience. We are especially interested in the role of literary writing in this ‘construction’ of a template for the experience of disease by sufferers. Our research aims to explore the differing discourses and representations of illnesses in the long eighteenth century to deliver a better understanding of the fashionability of disease in our own time.
Academic: literature, history, art, music, psychology, medical history, medicine; Non-academic: those interested in history of ideas and eighteenth-century history
Would be interested in hearing from…
Anyone wishing to collaborate, participate in workshops, come along to our events or anyone with similar interests. Please do get in touch.
Names and institutions of co-investigators/ collaborators:
n/a
Funding sources:
The Wellcome Trust (Seed Award)
Summary of research:
The project investigates the significance of science fiction for the medical humanities, and is intended to pathfind for a future, large-scale research project.
Science fiction isn’t confined to novels, short stories, and cinema; it also gives us a style and substance for our visions of medical progress. This project doesn’t investigate only the familiar genre elements of narrative fiction, cinema and TV. It also explores the so-called ‘technoscientific imaginary’, and its imagining of future possibilities enabled by biomedical progress.
The project’s activities include:
A series of themed workshops, and a concluding conference, consolidating a network of interested researchers, clinicians, and writers.
An online database of primary and secondary resources to aid future research.
A themed special issue of BMJ Medical Humanities on ‘Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities’
A creative writing competition, with successful entrants appearing in a competition anthology.
Matthew Wale, University of Leicester Funding sources:
The AHRC
Summary of research:
This project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with twenty-first century scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice. It is based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with the Natural History Museum, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. Researchers are drawing on these institutions’ historical collections, particularly science and medical journals of the nineteenth century. They also work with their scientific communities, addressing questions about the creation and circulation of knowledge in the digital age, and looking at innovative ways of breaking through the public/professional divide. Project website/webpage:
Historians of Science and Medicine, Cultural and Literary Historians of the Nineteenth Century, Scientific and Medical Professionals, Citizen Scientists and Patients
This project is supported by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme under Grant Agreement Number 340121
Summary of research:
This project explores medical, literary and cultural responses to perceived problems of stress and overwork in the Victorian age, anticipating many of the preoccupations of our own era. Particular areas of focus include: diseases of finance and speculation, diseases associated with particular professions, alcohol and drug addiction, travel for health, education and over-pressure in the classroom, the development of phobias and nervous disorders, and the imaginative construction of utopias and dystopias. The project aims to break through the compartmentalization of psychiatric, environmental, and literary history, and to offer new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century. Project website/webpage:
Durham University’s Centre for Medical Humanities, in collaboration with the Northern Network for Medical Humanities Research and the Wellcome Trust has set up the New Generations Programme to address an issue surfacing in the medical humanities. Emerging humanities researchers are increasingly engaging with interdisciplinary research but lack contexts in which to learn about and experience how it is done. Supported by a Collaborative Skills Development grant from the AHRC, this unique programme aims to deliver an exciting and innovative skills development package to a group of doctoral students and early career researchers in the medical humanities while facilitating the development of a supportive, interdisciplinary peer group. Additionally, the programme will create career development opportunities by enabling interaction between participants and staff in key centres of the medical humanities while engaging in discussions on the full range of medical humanities career options.
Hubbub is an international team of scientists, humanists, artists, clinicians, public health experts, broadcasters and public engagement professionals. We explore the dynamics of rest, noise, tumult, activity and work, as they operate in mental health, neuroscience, the arts and the everyday. We are based in London as the first residents of The Hub at Wellcome Collection from October 2014 to July 2016.
Our interdisciplinary project was awarded a £1m grant by the Wellcome Trust. The grant-holding institution is Durham University, and the project also draws on the resources of The Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and the University of York.
The Hub at Wellcome Collection is an exciting new space that will provide resources and a stimulating space for researchers and other creative minds to collaborate on a project that will explore medicine in historical and cultural contexts. The Hub will make a central contribution to the Trust’s vision of improving human and animal health and be a flagship interdisciplinary environment that nurtures this approach.
We are residents of The Hub until end of July 2016
Anticipated audiences:
Humanities researchers, social scientists, artists, cognitive neuroscientists, members of the public interested in questions of rest, work, noise, tumult, employees of The Wellcome Trust